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Novedge is the leading online store for design software. Visit our website for unparalleled search, comparison charts, and licensing information for over 8,000 titles at competitive prices.

Product Design

September 18, 2014

Editor's Note: We asked Andy Brown, the Training Manager for MODO at The Foundry, to join us again on the Novedge Blog for a four part series on MODO for Product Design. Here's the first installment of the series, the second and third installments will be published in October. And don't forget to sign up for our upcoming webinar on MODO, on October 8th, register here.

To stay up to date with all the latest blog posts, subscribe to the Novedge Blog here.

MODO has become an application capable of many things. Its underlying architecture allows its tools to be used in an almost unlimited number of ways. This isn’t surprising, as any modern VFX pipeline requires software that is versatile.

This versatility often means it’s difficult to pigeonhole applications like MODO, and that’s a good thing! The downside of this versatility is it can sometimes be difficult to get a clear view of what it can offer you, particularly if your field of work is very specific.

So if you work in the fields of Product Design or Design Visualisation, and are curious about MODO, here are 10 reasons why you should take a closer look .

1. Rendering

MODO’s renderer is an advanced, full integrated, part of the application. Capable of creating stunning imagery of incredible quality on par with any leading rendering solution. MODO’s Shader Tree allows you to mask and layer textures in a manner similar to Photoshop, and includes a powerful override system that allows you to easily experiment with the materials your creating. One license of MODO comes with the ability to create your own render farm with unlimited nodes, making MODO a incredibly economical solution for large scale rendering, and finally the Preview viewport gives you an interactive preview of the rendered scene allowing changes to be seen in context at incredible speed.

2. Presets

MODO allows you to create a wide variety of preset types. Material presets can be saved from the shader tree and then drag and dropped onto items in the scene, environment maps can be quickly loaded as presets or simply dragged from the browser as image files, full lighting rigs can be saved as assemblies and then loaded when needed, and mesh presets allow you to quickly layout a scene. MODO’s preset system not only allows you to manage the assets you create, but it also allows you to access a large number of presets available via the Foundry share site.

3. Mesh Fusion

Mesh Fusion is a plug-in for MODO that allows you to achieve realtime booleans with subdivision surfaces. It allows you to use MODO’s advanced range of organic modelling tools and deformers to create complex shapes, and then fuses them together quickly achieving complex unions, intersections or subtractions. The best part of this is this connection is completely live, as any changes that are made to the objects driving the fusion will filter through, meaning the whole process is non-destructive. This makes it the perfect tool for experimenting with complex organic surfaces, and the resulting watertight mesh can be easily printed.

4. Rigging

MODO’s flexible VFX rigging system can be used to develop useful tools that can aid your design process. For example a rig can be created that can build parametric values into a model helping you to define hard points in a design, and animation deformers can be utilised to achieve various non-destructive modelling tasks.

5. 3D Sketching

MODO’s 3D painting tools can be used to sketch directly onto a base volume allowing you to make decisions in 3D very early on in the design process, and 2D sketches that you might have already prepared can be projected onto a volume to act as a base for further painting or modelling.

6. SUBD Modeling

SUBD modeling allows objects to be created by constructing surfaces made up of flat polygon faces, and then these faces can be subdivided on the fly to smooth them. Due to the nature of this surface the ability to edit it is not constrained by how it’s constructed, allowing edits to be made locally with little or no impact on the rest of the model. This means that by using sketches as a guide, three dimensional volumes can be quickly created and then intuitively deformed with a range of organic editing tools such as falloffs. This in combination with the ability to sharpen edges make it the ideal medium for quickly defining and experimenting with complex organic surfaces.

7. Mesh Clean-up

Mesh data can often be messy when it comes from sources your unable to control, but thanks to MODO’s mature polygon modelling toolset you have all the tools you need for fixing the majority of problems. The star in the toolset is Mesh Clean-up, a utility that searches your mesh looking for problems and fixing them automatically.

8. CAD loader

The Powertranslater plug-in for MODO allows you to load STEP, IGES and Parasolid files directly into MODO. The beauty of this plug-in is it allows you to control tessellation on a per Item basis after the object has been loaded, and allows you to preview the tessellation as you adjust various values. This gives you the ability to really optimise the resulting mesh, and in combination with MODO’s native Solidworks support on Windows, allows a wide range of CAD files to be brought into MODO for rendering.

9. VFX toolset

When it comes to visualising a product you often need to do something more creative than just placing it in front of a white background. This is where you can really utilise all of MODO’s VFX tools. MODO’s Particle system can generate natural simulations of multiple objects, Replicators allow objects to be intelligently duplicated and randomly coloured, and MODO’s Dynamics system can be used to realistically pile up objects or fill containers. If you can imagine it, there’s a good chance you can visualise it!

10. Colorway

Colorway is a recent addition to the Foundry product line and is currently in public Beta. In combination with MODO it gives you a powerful look development pipeline. Once rendered from MODO images can be interactively adjusted within Colorway in realtime. The beauty of Colorway is it’s simplicity. The UI is simple and discoverable allowing you to create multiple looks for a product at incredible speed. Not only colours can be adjusted but also textures can be iterated and applied via UV maps in 2D space. Once completed the looks can then be pushed back into MODO for further development or final rendering.

To get your own copy of MODO or to upgrade, head over to Novedge. You have only until tomorrow to join the Foundry Fest and save 25% on your upgrade. And don't forget to subscribe to the Novedge Blog to be notified when a new blog post is published.

July 25, 2014

Recently we added MakerBot's 3D printers to our online catalog. As all technologies becoming mainstream, it's important to take advantage of them while they are still relatively new to maximize your chances of success. Here are four examples of entrepreneurs who recognized the potential of 3D printing right away and built lucrative businesses around it.

Rhino Designed Cake Toppers

Kyle and Liz von Hasseln decided to use their background in architectural design to start Sugar Lab, a company that 3D prints beautifully intricate cake toppers. Not only they grew their micro business to success, they ended up selling it to 3D Systems. Read my interview with Liz here.

Bigger is Better

Do you want to help the world and use your engineering skills at the same time? Why not build a giant 3D printer? Samantha Snabes crowdfunded and built the Gigabot with her fellow cofounders last year. Here's more about her amazing journey from Austin, Texas, to Santiago, Chile.

What's Important is Participation

Chris Anderson is arguably one of the most influential writers of everything tech. We asked him to share his thoughts on 3D printing, the Maker Movement and the democratization of manufacturing. Read his interview here. Hint: he loves MakerBot!

3D Printed Food

Would you like to skip some of the cooking and baking tonight? The future is here with Foodini, a 3D printer for food. This is definitely not your parents' kitchen appliance! Read our interview with Lynette Kucsma, cofounder of Natural Machines, here.

Do you know another project we should feature on the Novedge Blog? Let us know with a comment.

June 18, 2014

Editor's Note: We asked Andy Brown, the Training Manager for MODO at The Foundry, to describe, step by step, how to best include MODO in a product design workflow. He broke it down for us, providing useful screenshots along the way. Enjoy!

MODO is the ideal tool for the modeling and rapid visualization of design concepts. In combination with its CAD Loader and Exporter, it can sit comfortably alongside the more traditional engineering based CAD applications in your pipeline. To understand how MODO fits, you need to understand how MODO works as a modeling and rendering application, and also how the data it produces can be utilized.

Modeling

MODO is a polygon and subdivision surface modeler. Objects are created by constructing surfaces made up of flat polygon faces, and then these faces can be subdivided on the fly to smooth them. Due to the nature of this surface, the ability to edit it is not constrained by how it is constructed, therefore allowing edits to be made locally with little or no impact on the rest of the model. This means that by using sketches as a guide, three dimensional volumes can be quickly created and then intuitively deformed with a range of organic editing tools such as falloffs.

One of the most interesting things about modeling in MODO is that there are a number of directions you can take resulting in vastly differing workflows. For example, if you wish to more freely experiment with a shape you can utilize MODO’s sculpting tools. These allow you to paint a vast amount of detail into a shape without having to worry about some of the more technical aspects of polygonal modeling. When sculpting, a large amount of control can be achieved by utilizing masks, or by constraining your brush to a 2D or 3D curve. This allows you to control character lines or define cut lines or seams.

Modeling using boolean operations is nothing new to people used to using CAD software, but in MODO you are able to utilize a truly unique form of Boolean Operation with a plug-in called Mesh Fusion. Mesh Fusion allows you to take any number of polygonal shapes and combine them to create a live, fully editable boolean object. This allows you to take relatively simple and easily editable objects, and play with how they interact. This allows you to make design changes quickly and non destructively, allowing you to spend more time worrying about the object that your designing, rather than how you are going to model it!

Exporting

Once you’ve modeled a concept, it’s imperative that the data you’ve created is useful. During the modeling process you might have already made design changes based on your interaction with the volume you’ve created. The next step is to move that data out of MODO so it can continue to be utilized both physically and digitally.

How you export the object will depend on how it’s been modeled. If the object has been sculpted, or created using Mesh Fusion it will need to be saved in some polygonal format, as sculpted and Fusion surfaces can only be exported if they are first frozen or Tessellated. Once in this state they can then be saved as a Sterolithography or STL file for rapid prototyping, or in other common polygon formats such as OBJ or DXF. Objects in this state can then be imported into other CAD applications and act as reference for further development.

One of the great things about modeling with Subdivision Surfaces is that you are able to create very complex organic surfaces very quickly, surfaces that would be laborious to create in more traditional CAD applications. If you’ve modeled your design just as a subdivision surface then MODO allows you to export that data as a surface model. MODO’s CAD exporter allows you to save an object in a STEP, IGES or Parasolid format. When opened in an application such as Solidworks you will be presented with a surface that is ready to be edited, allowing you to immediately take your design into the next phase of development.

Visualization

As well as being a useful modeling tool at the beginning of any design process, MODO is also a useful visualization tool at any point during it. As well as being able to natively load Solidworks files, MODO’s CAD loader allows you to import STEP, IGES and Parasolid formats. When loaded, the object will appear as a surface model which you are then able to interactively tesselate on a per Item basis, giving you an enormous amount of control over the resulting mesh. Also the complexity of the model can be controlled by converting repeating objects into instances on load.Once imported you then have access to all of MODO’s powerful texturing and rendering tools. Decals can be applied in numerous ways. As well as the basic planer projection types you also have all of MODO’s celebrated UV tools at your disposal. These allow you to quickly apply artwork to difficult to reach areas by unwrapping all, or part of, the object.

Finally you’re able to utilize MODO’s beautiful render engine to help you create compelling images that really sell your design and place it in context. MODO’s render preview viewport gives you live updates, allowing you to see any change you make to the design in real time. Using a drag and drop workflow you’re able to quickly apply material, lighting and environment presets enabling you to iterate through different material and color ways with ease, and save those results as you go.

I’ve been using MODO for product visualization for many years and the thing that stands out for me is it’s flexibility. There is no one fixed way of doing anything in MODO. You choose a modeling process that is right for you and the product, and the speed at which you are able to make changes and develop a project is what makes it, in my opinion, a true artist's tool.

To get your own copy of MODO or to upgrade, head over to Novedge. And watch our most recent webinar on MODO, featuring Greg Brown showing how to make the best use of MODO 801's new design, asset creation and animation tools.